


Push the Trigger, Pull the Thread

by priellan (irinokat)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Ableism, Bodyswap, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 03:54:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 17,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irinokat/pseuds/priellan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an attempt to fix their restless minds after the breach closes, Hermann and Newt accidentally end up in each other's bodies and must deal with themselves and each other to figure their way out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My Big Bang fic! :D Many thanks to Alisson Bent for organizing this, to stripedtabby for the lovely artwork, and skysailor99 for betaing. I hope everyone enjoys this, we've worked hard on it!

[](http://imgur.com/GzjXKVr)

_It’s so tight in here. And dark. Well, kinda. That blue light thing isn’t doing jack – wait, am I in an MRI? What the hell? I was just – oh god it’s tight, why the hell is it so small in here, this is awful, fuck, fuck –_

_Shut UP!_

Newt sits up, shocked to hear Hermann’s voice roar through his mind. He shakes himself, breathing hard, trying to remember where he is. Something soft under him, enough space to move, to breathe, dark, really dark this time – his room. What the hell was that? He hasn’t dreamed in years. Why did it slammed his panic button so bad? Dregs of adrenaline make him shake, not helped any by the exhaustion that seeped into his bones over the last thirty-six hours. Something in the back of his mind feels even more tensed up – he can’t describe the feeling. It’s not him, he’s not feeling that stressed, but it’s there all the same. He rubs his hand over his face, trying to remember what happened just before he fell asleep, trying to remember anything in order after the chaos he threw himself into yesterday morning.

An MRI, and Hermann… He realizes what the problem is. Shit. He runs so fast out of his room that it’s a minor miracle he doesn’t slam into his door or face-plant into the elevator at the end of the hall. He hops from one foot to the other as he waits for the stupid thing to inch upwards, toward the Shatterdome’s medical offices, wishing he’d thought to put on shoes. The metal floor is freezing, negating any warmth his worn socks might hold.

The second the doors open, he flies down the hall, into the medical wing. He knows the offices like the back of his hand, finds his way to the MRI room, and slides in, not caring if he’s interrupting procedures. He stops the second the door closes. Hermann sits on the bed of the machine, extended out of it, shaking and gripping it as if he thinks he’s going to fall off of it if he lets go. He attempts to glare at Newt, but he’s still too shaken up to do much of anything.

Newt rests his hands on Hermann’s shoulders. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispers, running his hands up and down Hermann’s arms. “I – I’m sorry, it’s okay –”

“G-get your h-hands off of m-m-me!”

“Relax, relax, it’ll be –”

“I _s-said_ –”

“Hermann. It helps.” _It helps me,_ Newt finds himself thinking. Hermann is not _me._

“I-it – n-no, d-d-don’t,” Hermann gasps out. Newt is surprised he’s able to talk at all; when he has panic attacks, he usually hyperventilates so bad that he nearly passes out. He flushes when he hears Hermann’s voice, even though Hermann’s mouth doesn’t move: _You know I don’t like being touched._

Newt pulls his hands off of Hermann’s arms. “Just – just focus on breathing, okay?” Hermann nods. “C’mon, deep breaths. You can do it, c’mon, I’ve heard you before you scream at me.”

“I –” Hermann starts before he shudders. “I-I do n-not – d-do not scream.”

“Oh, you totally do, sometimes you shriek and you sound like a little –” Newt stops himself. Now is not a good time to get into an argument. “Whatever, whatever. Just – just breathe.” He barely notices how shallow his own breaths become until he and Hermann both try to fill their lungs at the same time. His chest feels constricted, but not as tight as it does when he’s the one panicking. He puts one hand on Hermann’s, gently rubbing his wrist with his thumb. Hermann tenses for a moment. Newt starts to pull away, but Hermann reaches out and grabs his hand, movements jerky and fingers twitching.

Slowly their breathing falls into sync, shaky but steady, deep. When he thinks Hermann can handle it, Newt pitches forward, throwing his arms around Hermann’s chest. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, barely noticing as the words tumble out of his mouth over and over and over –

Hermann pats him on the back, making him stop short. “It’s alright.”

“No, no it’s not,” Newt says, holding him tighter. He feels Hermann tense up again and pulls away. “It’s my fault.”

“It isn’t –”

“Have you ever freaked out because you’re claustrophobic before?” Newt asks. Hermann opens his mouth, then closes it again. “C’mon, dude, I’ve seen you holed up under your desk for days when you get annoyed with the simulator’s wiring. It’s not… not you.”

Hermann sits for a moment, silent. When he finally speaks, he doesn’t look at Newt. “Perhaps the Drift transferred… transferred some things.”

Newt laughs. “Yeah, well, I guess we’ll worry when you start bouncing off walls or talking as fast as I do or start acting like an ADD kid.”

“I don’t think that will be an issue,” Hermann says flatly.

“Okay, seriously, not this again. How many times do I have to tell you –”

“Please stop. Just because someone gave you a diagnosis doesn’t mean –”

“I do have a problem, okay?” Newt blurts out, face turning red. He hates talking about this. Hates it. Doesn’t help that Hermann won’t believe him. “ADHD is a legit problem, not being able to concentrate can be chronic –”

Hermann sighs. “This is not the time. How did you know I was down here? Did you sense me, somehow?”

Newt shrugs, frustrated. “Maybe? I don’t…” He turns his head and rubs the back of his neck. “I think… I think when I fell asleep, I was – I was in here. With – with you.” When he finally turns back to look at Hermann, the man isn’t angry. Well, he looks pissed off, but at least it isn’t real anger. This is more like one of their arguments than one of the few times Newt actually manages to hit one of his buttons.

“I thought I heard you talking,” Hermann says as he looks at the machine, innards still glowing blue. “I thought it was just my own thoughts, or some remnant of the drift. The ghost memories.” He glances around the room, refusing to look at Newt. “I suppose it explains why you knew where to find me.”

“Yeah, I…” Newt looks around as well. “Where are the doctors? I know you can’t operate something like this by yourself, especially if you’re the one in it.”

Hermann sighs. “Part of the staff was relieved in light of today’s events, and most are looking after Becket and Mori. The nurses who were looking at me spoke five more words of English than I can Cantonese. I think they went to find a doctor who speaks English.”

“Jesus, good going, med bay,” Newt says, annoyed. His encounters with the medical staff are unpleasant, at best. Hearing something like that just upsets him even more. They have no idea how Hermann could have been affected by drifting with an alien creature – they don’t know how it might have affected Newt, for that matter. How could they just leave him?

“It’s understandable. It’s not every day we save the world.”

Newt blinks and looks down at Hermann. A small smile crosses his lips. Newt grins back at him. “Yeah, well, the world still turning means people still get sick.” Newt staggers towards the door. “I’m gonna find someone who we can talk to about this.”


	2. Chapter 2

“This isn’t going to work.”

“You’ve been saying that for hours now –” the doctor starts.

“So it’d be nice if you finally listened!” Newt growls, restless and irritable. He spent the whole damn morning in the medical offices, seeing one doctor after another, getting yelled at for not coming in sooner, for falling asleep, for drifting with such obviously flawed equipment. They nearly needed to tie him down when one tried to force him to get in the MRI machine. He finds himself wondering who cleared these assholes with their terrible bedside manner.

He feels a hand on his shoulder. “Wartime does no one favors,” Hermann says quietly. Newt sighs and leans against him as he addresses the doctors, who want to sedate Newt in order to shut him into an MRI.

The hand on his shoulder shakes him awake. He shoots up when he realizes he was dozing off, Hermann’s hand the only thing keeping him upright when he trips over his own overtired feet. “Here’s my suggestion,” Newt drawls, “And you don’t have to take it up, it’s not like it’s coming from a fucking expert biologist with six fuckin’ doctorates –”

“Newton.” Hermann’s voice sounds like he’s chastising a small child. Newt would glare at him if he had the energy.

“Okay, look. We have equipment specifically made to link two minds, and we have an entire goddamn LOCCENT that was made just to monitor people’s brainwaves and vitals and all that while they link up. Why don’t we just use that?”

The doctors look unsure. Hermann just glares down at him, and Newt can feel the annoyance burning in the back of his mind like acid. “We don’t need to perform a neural handshake to determine that our minds are functioning correctly. It might prove the opposite, in fact.”

“Oh, come on, Hermann, we’ve already done it once in the last few hours, I think –”

“That was because we had no other choice. And now we have other choices.”

“Other choices that involve panic attacks.” _Panic attacks that are my fault,_ Newt adds mentally. He sees Hermann flinch as he thinks it, wonders how much of that went through.

“Other choices that don’t involve us being linked so intimately.”

Newt sighs. “Come on, Hermann, it’s not like I’m gonna share your diary with the class.”

“That is not the issue.”

 “Then what is?” Hermann stares down, as if he expects Newt to read his mind. Maybe he is. What had they been doing all night and day, with his dreams and their emotions? “C’mon, Hermann, they’re going to want to look at the connection anyways.”

“That is irrelevant.”

“No, it’s not!” Newt says. “What if our data makes it easier to identify drift compatibility in the future?”

“Hopefully, that won’t be necessary.”

It’s Newt’s turn to be pissy at Hermann, glancing up at him with all the annoyance he can muster. “You know it will be.” Hermann says nothing, but Newt can practically feel him gritting his teeth. “Look, it won’t take too long, and then we’ll be done with the brain scans and all the other crap. I want to be done. Can we please just be done?”

Hermann takes a few more moments to think about it, leaving Newt to shift around uncomfortably, thankful at least that Hermann is considering it. Considering is good. Considering is a maybe, and maybe maybe pretty much always means no, but “pretty much always” still leaves a little room for yes. And occasionally, Hermann comes to see the brilliance of Newt’s ideas before Newt tests them out and shows him just how good they are.

“Take the sedatives, Newton.”

“Come on, man, don’t be like this, it won’t –”

“I was fine once they brought help. You will be too. Unless this is another one of your ‘issues.’”

“You don’t understand!” The look Hermann levels at him freezes the words in his throat. This man has been in his head. He’s probably the only one who could understand… And yet he doesn’t.

Once his throat unsticks, Newt tries to keep arguing, but he’s done and he knows it. The doctors put him under and slip him in, and he tries not to cry when it doesn’t put him to sleep and leaves him stranded in the machine, waiting for this nightmare to be over.


	3. Chapter 3

_dark dark why is everything so dark cold what is this it’s wet what are those creatures why are they so small – what is this taste, this taste is bad, this taste is alien, follow taste, find the surface, breathe, find the landmass, there they are, little creatures, crush, destroy, exterminate, we will hunt you we will kill you we will fight we will win we will conqu_

Newt gasps as his head snaps from the dreams – memories? – he was caught in to the pillow. He sits up, brain foggy from sleep and something else, what is that something else, he should remember. This is not his bed. This is not his room. If a woman would wander in, he could even say it isn’t his beautiful wife. But no one wanders in and he is alone, stuck in a room he has no memory of going to. What was the last thing that happened? The MRI, right, the sedatives. They must have kicked in much later than the doctors expected. He can still feel the medicine fuzz lingering in his mind, urging him to go back to sleep, but sleep means the kaiju dreams, and those are not something he wants to experience again.

There’s a twinge of annoyance in the back of his head. Hermann. It feels strong, either he’s close or he is super-pissed. Newt opens the door to see Hermann reaching for the handle. “So what the hell happened?” Newt asks before Hermann can chastise him for being up. Somehow he knows that he’s not supposed to be awake right now.

“The medicine they gave you for the MRI didn’t kick in until after the procedure. You were complaining about it until you started to fall asleep on your feet, so we moved you in here.”

“Ah, okay. So I didn’t actually pass out or anything, that’s good.” A wave of relief floods Newt, and he glances up at Hermann, knowing at least some of it came from him. He never feels things that strongly. Hermann shrugs and turns, Newt catching only a glimpse of the redness on his cheeks before he twists away. “Did you – did you feel those dreams?”

“What?” Hermann turns back, face still pink. Newt knows he did, he would have just ignored Newt if he hadn’t.

“You – you saw them, felt them, whatever. The kaiju, the – the –” Newt can’t keep going. He knows about the destruction of the cities from news reports and crushed sites when he went on specimen-gathering trips. He had never even lost a relative to the tragedies the way many people in the PPDC had. Everything was distant to him, sad, yes, but not his personal problem to deal with; he just needed to look at the kaiju and figure them out. Seeing the destruction up close, and not even from the perspective of the victims but through the eyes of the destroyer, was frightening, visceral, disgusting. Even trying to see through the water of the deep ocean had been eerie through the kaiju’s strange six-eyed vision.

“What I felt is none of your business.”

Newt grabs Hermann’s wrist. “Maybe that wasn’t true before, Hermann, but we’re connected at the brain now, and when we start seeing freaky shit like that, then maybe it _is_ my business!”

Hermann rips his arm away. “Seeing the memories of the person you drifted with in dreams is perfectly normal. Disturbing in this case, but normal. If the nightmares get worse, then perhaps-”

“Are you seriously not worried about this?”

“What could we do to fix it?” Hermann demands, face turning red again with anger. “What do you suggest? Drifting is an uncertain technology in the best of circumstances, and you created a machine out of _garbage_ , then decided it was a good idea to try a neural handshake not only with a different species, but aliens from another _dimension!_ ” Hermann is shouting now, well and truly angry, not even the normal berating he does when they argue but voice raised and free hand jabbing into Newt’s chest. “It was your bright idea to do something so stupid, and it was my decision to help you with it when you chose to do it a _second_ time, and I am now paying the price for that as well as you!”

“But if we could fix it –”

“Where would we even begin?”

“We drift again.”

“No.” Hermann finally realizes that he’s touching Newt and pulls his hand back to his side, leaving it dangling. He never knows what to do with his free hand, Newt recalls, and was almost glad to get the cane just so that he always has something to hold. He grips the head of it with both hands now, fingers turning white from his tension.

Newt places his hands over Hermann’s, wanting to do something, anything to make him relax. “Why are you so opposed to this?” Newt asks quietly. “We’ve already been in each other’s heads. It won’t be something new. It’s not the most fun thing, sure, but it should be easier the second time, not harder.”

“That is not – I don’t –” Hermann pulls his hands away and starts to walk down the hall again. “This is not a matter I find up for discussion, Newton. You will respect my decision.”

“Even if we drifted with the real thing?” Newt yells after him. He doesn’t turn or stop this time.

They have similar conversations several times over the next few days, both getting angrier as the nightmares grow worse, more varied, more tangled with their own memories – Newt crying about his mother leads to his mother morphing into Knifehead, Hermann fails a vision test for piloting and vomits acid instead of bile afterward, kaiju destroy Boston and Berlin and Hong Kong all over again.

As they start arguing again when Marshall Hansen just wants a report on activity around the area where the Breach was, he stops them. “Look, you two need to resolve this at some point,” he says, trying hard to contain his own annoyance, “preferably sooner rather than later, but for now, I just need the damn numbers, thank you very much.”

Humbled, Hermann hands him a print-out, trying to explain what they mean and tripping over his words, speaking faster than normal. He sounds almost like Newt. “I apologize, sir,” Hermann says as he walks Hansen to the door. “We seem to be at… at an impasse in our… situation.”

“You’ve both been more tired than usual,” Hansen says. “Is there something I should know about? The world isn’t ending anymore. You don’t need to be working yourselves to the bone.”

“We’ll... We will figure it out.” Hermann sighs, resigned. “You have plenty of things to worry about, Marshall, don’t make us one of them.”

Hermann turns to Newt once the door shuts. “If you really think drifting again would help, I’m willing to try.” He ignores Newt’s fist-pumps of victory. “Now how will this work?”


	4. Chapter 4

So the simulation training room is not the place Newt would have chosen for this drift, but it’s better than nothing. At least there aren’t any Jaegers they could accidentally activate, or any questionable parts of the kind currently running his own contraption, as Hermann deems it. (Contraption is nice for Hermann, very nice. It’s somewhere near “good” on the Hermann compliment scale that exists solely in Newt’s mind.)

Newt taps his fingers against his leg as he waits for Tendo to load his program and give the all-clear, feeling every ache that passes through his knees and occasionally feeling a twinge that could only have come from Hermann’s legs. The harnesses they’re hooked into were built to imitate that of a conn-pod, and conn-pods are not places to sit and relax. He turns to Hermann and starts to apologize, hoping his leg isn’t in too much pain, but Tendo comes on over the room’s tinny intercom as he opens his mouth. “Okay, you guys ready?”

“Fire this baby up,” Newt says, trying to smile at Hermann, who looks like he’s about to have a root canal without anesthetic.

“Ready, Mr. Choi.”

“You two have done this before, you know how it goes. Get ready for the jump. Starting in ten, nine…” Newt starts to hum, trying to keep calm, relax, make this easy. Hermann screws his eyes shut. Newt isn’t sure whether he’s just concentrating or if he’s trying to block Newt out. There’s a twinge of irritation in the back of his head, directed at him, that’s quickly tamped down and overpowered by a forced sense of stillness. “… Three, two, and go!” Newt jumps a little as the machinery throws him deep into his own jumbled thoughts.

_gotta get through this I gotta get through this I gotta_

_why are you thinking of that song of all the ones you could_

_Newt’s father cooks dinner and sings off-key to tease his mother while he does his homework at the kitchen table_

_Hermann tries to write a paper as his roommate blares whatever music he feels like_

_Newt plucks at a guitar’s strings, too hyped up to concentrate on the sheet of paper on_

_the hum and grind of the factory’s machinery interrupted by a brother crying out in pain_

_Hermann’s sister tugs his headphones off and grabs his_

_Newt throws an eraser at Hermann’s stereo when he_

_new sounds, much smaller creatures, muted by the water washing over our_

_Hermann stands by the cold ocean, trying to rub the sand from his_

_rough grit under our feet cold loose it shifts don’t trust_

_Newt slips and falls on a patch of_

_Hermann trips, life flashes before h_

_falling falling through the bre_

“One hundred percent synced,” Tendo says over the intercom, voice sounding confused over the rush of Newt and Hermann’s thoughts. _What? What about that is confusing?_

 _We are not the only ones in our heads,_ Hermann thinks, and Newt feels the fear rolling off of him in light orange stomach-curdling waves. They both wince as they relive Knifehead resurfacing through pain and rage.

 _Those are just memories,_ Newt insists, trying to ignore the gaping blue void that stretches through their headspace. It’s hard to describe; he can see what’s going on around him in the physical world as if it’s way off in the distance, and right in front of him, he catches flashes of his own thoughts, images and colors from Hermann almost like gifs. Everything is blue, but he’s pretty sure that’s normal, from the firsthand accounts and scientific reports he’s read on the subject.

 _That is not normal_ , Hermann nearly shouts back, forcing Newt to gaze straight into the void – only it’s not a void, it’s like webbing or a network so dense it looks solid from here, it pulses and undulates, they see Manila from above as Hundun storms through, feel Onibaba’s rage as Coyote Tango drives him back, Trespasser grows confused at the cables tangling in her jaws and digits before the thought is overridden with _destroy DESTROY DESTROY_ –

“What’s happening?” a tech asks. Did Tendo leave the intercom on?

“Their heart rates are going crazy, they chased a RABIT at the same time so they’re still aligned but they’re not  
–” Newt and Hermann look at each other mentally and physically, forcing each other away from the kaiju thoughts. Newt hopes that what they saw were just impressions – _no they’re not, you need to face it –_ _shut up Hermann, that can’t be them, we’re human, they can’t be_ – “Guys, talk to me, what’s going on?”

“The – the hivemind,” Hermann spits out. “We can see into the hivemind.”

“What?” Newt wonders if Marshall Pentecost spoke to anyone other than the two of them about what Newt saw in his first drift. Obviously, he didn’t say anything to Tendo. _Or he simply doesn’t remember_ , a thought that sounds like Hermann but not at the same time says.

Newt blinks and glances around him. The only clear thing in their headspace are threads leading back to the hivemind. Reality is blurring even more than their headspace, no, not blurring, he’s got double vision, he reaches for his own thoughts and can’t tell them from Hermann’s, _Hermann where are you, I’m right here you idiot, where, I’m  - I don’t know, where am I?_ The hivemind network suddenly feels close, much too close, Newt screams or was that Hermann, he thinks it was him but the pitch is wrong, his leg hurts so bad, Knifehead screeches as he goes down the first time, Meathead thrashes in his cage as he feels a new brother’s creation pains, Newt can feel his heart racing in his throat, no wait is that Hermann, _I knew this was a terrible idea I knew I knew I knew_ –

“Stop the sync!” Hermann shouts with Newt’s voice.

“We did!” comes a static-filled reply from Tendo. Newt and Hermann stare at each other in horror. “Shutting down now!”

 _What if this doesn’t work, how are our minds still synced, is this the hivemind, did my equipment fuck us up, we are human and we don’t work this way, normal drifts keep me distinct from you, why can’t I tell where you start and I end_ , there is no seam, no rift between Newt and Hermann, there is no I, _there is we_ , there are separate bodies but one entity, one thought, one driving purpose, seek, destroy, dest-

Newt feels himself fall backward for less than a second before he passes out.


	5. Chapter 5

His head is full of static when he becomes conscious once more. It takes a few moments for him to sort out basics, the concept of individuality, _I am the only one in my body, I am me, I am Newton Geiszler but call me Newt, MIT grad, professional world saver and monster expert._ He opens his eyes as he settles back into his body, feeling the muscles tremble and seize, registering the smells of sweat and vomit and metal. Dark gray ceiling, that doesn’t tell him much. He sits up and looks around – med bay, has to be, basic bed and machinery surrounding him looks too much like a hospital not to be. Everything is the wrong height. He swings his leg over the side of the cot and winces as his knee locks up, ten times worse than it normally does when he’s gotten a little too much exercise. Why doesn’t his other leg hurt as bad? This must be the one he landed on when he was running from Otachi’s baby. “Remind me not to spend any more nights running around Hong Kong,” he says, but the words sound wrong coming from his mouth, the pitch is too low. Did he mess up his voice that badly?

He stops and stares at the next bed over, barely noticing Tendo and some nurses doing their thing as he wonders if he really just woke up. Maybe this is a dream, some kind of out of body experience caused by the drift. It wouldn’t surprise him, considering how far south it went. He rubs his eyes and notices the lack of glasses. Well, if he’s a ghost, he wouldn’t feel them, that’s obvious, but when he opens his eyes, he can’t even see the frames in his peripherals like he normally does.  He guesses it doesn’t matter, since he can see perfectly fine. Maybe that’s just ghost vision.

“Hermann,” someone says, probably Tendo, but he’s too distracted to pay much attention. “Hermann, are you alright?”

Newt takes one last look at the other bed before glancing down at himself. The white button-down is the only thing that’s familiar and it’s not nearly dirty enough to be his. The sweater and jacket are definitely not his, and neither are the ugly grey pants. He tries to move his leg, bounce it up and down the way he does when he gets nervous, but it won’t obey him the way it normally does, moving too slow, making some kind of creaking noise that he knows only he can hear, pain surging through his knee and thigh with every move. He stops. Looks over at the other bed.

“Hermann?”

“Okay, I know you’re not gonna believe this,” Newt says, and god, his voice sounds all wrong, “I barely get it either, but, uh, I’m Newt.”

Tendo looks pissed. “If this is some kind of practical joke that Newt managed to pull you into before we did all this,” Tendo warns, “It is not funny.”

“What the hell kind of prank is that?” Newt asks. “That’s worse than that time I tried to make a whoopee cushion out of a kaiju bladder.” Mako’s stare grows more intense. “What? You can do a lot with bladders. Theirs are surprisingly small, for a creature of that –”

“That’s enough,” Tendo says. He glances over at the other bed. Newt watches his body stir – he means, he watches his body from the outside – that is his body on the bed, what the hell? Everyone stops and stares at the person who should be Newt as he sits up and groans, rubbing his head. He stops when his fingers rub over the scab on his forehead. He glances up, then squints. Newt sighs, gets to his feet, and hobbles over to the other bed. He can’t get this damn leg to work properly. Tendo reaches for his arm, but he manages to get to the bed without keeling over. He reaches over his, Newt’s, body – what is even the fuck, if his knee weren’t throbbing in pain he’d still think he was dreaming – and grabs the glasses that sit on a monitor next to the bed. He slides them onto his own face. Unreal.

Hermann, well, Newt, well, Hermann in Newt’s body, glances up at him, slams his eyes shut, opens them again, blinks rapidly. Newt sits down, his leg’s ache easing but not going away. Newt watches himself say, “What in God’s name…?” He looks surprised by the high, scratchy pitch of his voice.

“Um. Hermann.” Hermann – Newt’s body – looks up at him. There are about a million things Newt could say right now and they all involve apologizing and he’s never been good at that. “Her- Hermann. Man, I – I fucked up.”


	6. Chapter 6

[ ](http://imgur.com/5lRqQ4n)

“Would you stop – stop using those _vulgarities_?” Hermann asks. He pauses at least once a sentence, still not used to the way his voice sounds now. It cracks and pitches for reasons he can’t comprehend, as if he somehow went back in time to re-experience puberty.

“You never minded my swearing before.” Hearing his own voice with a distinctly American accent is off-putting. Does Newton find it odd to hear his voice with a British accent? Why does he have his own accent in Newton’s body? Isn’t that something that would be more a part of his mouth, his body than just his mind? Then again, it’s not as strong as it normally is, and he can feel himself stumbling a little over certain sounds. And it certainly sounds better than any awful accent Newton’s attempted in the past.

He realizes that his thoughts are getting away from him and snaps back to Newton. He’s not used to having to look up at everyone, but especially not at himself. Though it’s not really himself right now, is it? This is just confusing. “I do mind it in professional settings –”

“Which we’re not in right now.”

“ _Or –_ ” Hermann was trying to add emphasis to what he was saying, but it just comes out as a higher pitch instead. Did Newton have his vocal cords replaced with a squeaky toy at some point in his life? That thought is much crueler than such thoughts normally are, but right now, Hermann doesn’t really care. “Or when you are using _me_ to swear for you!”

“Dude, I’m not –”

“And stop saying that!” Hermann snaps.

Newton groans. “Only you would give a shit about my word choice at a time like this.”

“Only you,” Hermann shouts, not caring that his voice goes so high-pitched that only dogs could hear it, “would manage to get me stuck in your body with no way out!” He glares harder at Newt. “And don’t you dare make a that’s-what-she-said joke.” He watches Newton grin. It looks so very out of place on his own face.

“Last thing on my mind, Hermann,” Newton states, attempting one of his awful accents to imitate Hermann. He ends up actually sounding like Hermann for one or two syllables. Hermann might have been impressed if he wasn’t so angry.

Tendo takes advantage of the lull in the argument to say, “Well, I’m glad to see you two are getting along as well as ever.” Hermann scowls at him, frown only deepening as Tendo covers his mouth, clearly trying to hide his snickering.

Newton groans looking at him. “Oh god, I really do look like a wet puppy when I try to be angry. Stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

Newton waves at his face. “That. The thing you do.”

“That’s so helpful, Newton, I’ll just stop my eyes from blinking and my heart from beating –”

“You know what I mean!”

Hermann tries his hardest to look threatening with Newton’s face and mouth and beautiful eyes – oh dear he did not just think that he does not think Newton’s eyes are beautiful at least not right now – and says, “You know, I might know what you mean if I were in _my own body_!”

Newton looks like Hermann just slapped him. “Look, I’m – it’s – it’ll be fine, okay?”

“No, it will not!” Hermann screams. Tendo and Mako look like they’re not sure whether to laugh or cover their ears.

“All we have to do is drift again –”

“How much of an idiot are you? No!”

“That hurts, Hermann. That really does.” And Hermann can’t tell through the sound of his own voice whether Newton is serious or not, even though it pitches in similar ways to Newton’s when he’s joking. No wonder Newton had a hard time understanding his sarcasm when they first met.

“We are not drifting again until we are absolutely sure it will fix – fix –” Hermann gestures between them. “This.”

“But I don’t even know how this happened in the first place.”

“And that is precisely the problem!” Hermann takes his glasses off and tries wiping them off with Newton’s shirt. The man really needs to take better care of his clothing, this shirt is filthy and his glasses are spotted with who knows what.

Newton turns to Tendo. “Do you have any idea what happened?”

Tendo shrugs. “Fucked if I know. Everything was going fine – maybe a little too well – when you guys started some intense RABIT-chasing. And then you passed out.”

“Too well?” Hermann repeats.

“Two people can’t stay perfectly in sync all the time, that’s just impossible,” Tendo replies. “We usually want to keep pilots in the ninety-five to ninety-eight range, sometimes they manage a hundred at the start and for more than a second, sometimes they dip a little too low, but they stay in that range most of the time. You guys started out at ninety-seven –” Tendo’s hand shoots up, then flattens and moves in a straight line. “Then boom, one hundred right until you passed out and then you zeroed out at the same time. Even when it was obvious that you were both offline and chasing RABITs, you went in and out at the same time, down to the same second.”

Newton and Hermann stare at him. “You’re kidding,” Newton finally says.

“Nope. And it sounded like you might have an idea why?” Tendo folds his arms and waits for one of them to speak.

When neither of them know what to say, Mako prompts, “You said something about a hivemind.” She nods towards Hermann’s body, though now that Hermann remembers the moment, he knows he said it.

Newton answers her anyways. “The kaiju are all – all connected, their thoughts, memories – one mind in multiple bodies. It’s how we could figure out the breach from drifting with them, how they knew where to find me even with a piece of dying brain, how – how –” he goes quiet, eyes widening, mind clearly still going even though his mouth no longer follows. Hermann thinks he feels guilt tangled in their connection, realization, anger, fear.

Hermann picks up for him. “When we drifted with the kaiju, we saw into their mind as they saw into ours. And when we drifted again just now, just the two of us…” he coughs, feeling silly as he says this. “That hivemind connection was still there.”

“You mean, even through the breach?” Tendo sounds incredulous and Hermann can’t blame him.

“I’m not quite sure what it was.” Hermann sighs. “It could have been the actual hivemind, it could have been our memories of it, perhaps something related to ghost-drifting…”

“It was the real thing.”

“You can’t be certain.”

“I know what the real thing feels like,” Newton says with a certainty that Hermann finds frightening. “That was it.”

“Then why didn’t we see any new information when we looked into it?”

“Because we weren’t looking for it.” Newton doesn’t sound as sure about this. Would he make up his mind? “Because we drifted for maybe a minute before we were out. You know how many memories it took us to get through before we could think clearly, come on.”

“I’m not willing to say for sure unless we can somehow test it again,” Hermann says.

“Can’t you just trust me?” Newton’s trying to make the puppy-dog face he normally makes when Hermann says something that he finds hurtful, but it doesn’t look right at all on Hermann’s face, just looking silly with his thin lips pinched and tired eyes wide. Hermann really wishes he would just stop.

He has a thought. Normally, when he has such a thought, he’d hold himself back until he could think of an actual retort that wouldn’t hurt, but he finds himself pressing on regardless now, mouth opening before he can stop himself. “Trusting you is why I’m in this mess right now. I don’t see why I should ever trust you again.”

For a moment, Newton looks genuinely hurt. Then he tries to hide it, tries to imitate Hermann’s usual calm anger. “I guess I deserve that.”

There’s a strange silence between them that seems to stretch on forever. Normally their arguments just get louder, shouting more volatile, until one of them leaves the room. Their anger does not work in silence. Even Tendo and Mako don’t seem sure what to do. Finally, Tendo sighs and says, “Well, we should probably tell… tell somebody.”

“Who?”

Tendo shrugs. “Herc’s still in charge for now, at least. I’ll let him know, and other than that…”

“Is this something people really need to know?” Hermann asks.

“We’re not even sure if letting people know about drifting with a kaiju is a good idea yet,” Tendo admits. “Maybe we should keep this all under wraps until we have it sorted out.”

“No,” Newt says. Hermann glares at him. No one makes jokes about puppies this time.

“You will receive recognition for your efforts in due time –”

“But what if someone else can help? Lightcap, Schoenberg –”

“You got us into this mess,” Hermann snaps. “I know perfectly well that you can get us out. Isn’t that why you’re always bragging about your doctorates, because you can do anything?” Newt goes pale. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to rest. My head feels like it’s on fire.”

“You sure that’s not just my hair?” Newt says in a weak attempt to joke. No one comes even close to laughing.


	7. Chapter 7

“Where are you going?”

“To my room,” Hermann snaps as he turns down the hall.

“Uh, dude, you should probably go to mine.” Hermann winces as he hears the word “dude” in his own voice. 

“Excuse me?”

Newt shrugs. “It might look weird if we’re sleeping in our own rooms, y’know?”

“I don’t care. I just want to sleep.”

“Look, I don’t think my room is set up to handle your leg, okay?” Hermann glares at him. “Dude, I don’t wanna wake up and trip over something and fuck you up even worse!”

Hermann thinks about it for a moment. “I’m surprised you managed to think of that.”

“I’m not that much of a jackass,” Newt mutters. It’s still odd for Hermann to hear his own voice saying such things in such a casual tone. What little swearing he’d done in his life had always been hesitant or angry, unfamiliar and heavy on his tongue. “Plus all my medication’s in my room, and you’re gonna need it when you wake up.”

“But it’s my mind.”

“Your mind, in my body.” Newt taps Hermann’s cane against the ground; it sets Hermann’s teeth on edge, probably why he did it. “It’s still my brain, and my brain is still… well… fucked up, even with you using it.” Newt looks down at his leg. “I mean, I’m the one with the shit leg now, right? You’re not the one who needs pain meds or whatever it is you keep in the lab for it.”

“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t refer to my body in that way,” Hermann says, sees Newt’s mouth open to repeat him in that childishly mocking way that annoys him so, and cuts him off. “And I don’t see why whatever mental problems you have would translate to me. In fact, why don’t you take your medicine to your – my room with you, if you’re so concerned?”

Newt sighs. “Because my brain is still in my body, and my brain is what has problems with serotonin receptors and all of that shit. It’s chemical imbalances, not just my head.  Do you have anything I need to take before I sleep or when I wake up?”

“It’s all labeled on the bottles.” Hermann heads down Newt’s hallway, checking his pocket and hoping Newt remembered his keys today. “Now let me sleep.”


	8. Chapter 8

When Hermann wakes up, he can’t believe his eyes. 3AM? But he’d gone to bed only four hours earlier, there was no alarm, surely he could sleep longer. An hour and a half of tossing and turning later, he gives up on the idea and turns to Newton’s laptop.

Being in Newt’s head is at least an advantage when it comes to things like passwords; Hermann has no trouble getting into Newt’s files, even with the complexity of his security. Hermann had no idea the man was so paranoid; nearly everything he logs into has two and three-step security, and Hermann is just lucky that Newton forgot his phone yesterday before the drift. He checks all of Newton’s files, spread across three different storage clouds, his hard drive, and several flashdrives and external hard drives stowed away in the bottom drawer of his dresser.

The room is surprisingly neat. Hermann had been expecting a mess last night, laundry everywhere, books and food scattered about and rotting. To be honest, that had been one of the main reasons he was hesitant about going to Newt’s room; they’d been living in the Shatterdome for so long that any of the carbon-copy rooms was home, but Hermann had been expecting chaos. Instead, Newton does have his things organized, but in a haphazard, Newtonish way that wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone else. He keeps his extra wires and plugs hung on a hanger in the closet, he keeps his computer supplies next to his clothes, his nightstand is covered in books but they’re stacked neatly and organized by subject, only one stack seeming out of place and so full of bookmarks and dog ears that Hermann’s pretty sure it’s just what Newt’s been reading lately. How does he find the time?

Hermann realizes how long he’s been glancing around the room and goes back to looking through Newton’s files. These, too, are organized to some degree, folders labeled neatly and easy to flick through. The files are more trouble, often having goofy names or keyboard smashes Newton obviously wrote in frustration. The silly names are at least slightly related to whatever Newton’s been working on, so Hermann finds what he needs buried in them, but he has to go through each keyboard-smash-random title individually and figure out if it’s important or not.

When he finds information relevant to what he needs, Hermann compiles it into a separate document. He finds himself pausing every few minutes to either check something else – his e-mail, a new file, Newton’s phone – or to follow a train of thought away from his task. He grows more annoyed as he keeps catching himself, wondering why he’s so distracted. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to concentrate for more than a few moments at a time.

Perhaps this is what Newton was talking about…? No, no, it’s just that he’s tired and can’t get back to sleep. He’ll nap after this. Newton’s always complained of a light sleep schedule, perhaps he’s simply not adjusted to this body yet. 

Digging deeper than two years into the files reveals nothing of use to Hermann. Apparently Newton first had this idea when they had first moved to Hong Kong. It’s a longer period than Hermann expected, but at least it wasn’t something he’d been completely obsessing over. Hermann checks and double-checks his various codes for the drift machine, amazed at some of the strange information and commands chained together, glad Newton had left himself little notes on why he’d done everything. (Though they were difficult to decipher, even with Newton’s memory at his disposal. His shorthand is atrociously unorthodox. What the hell does ‘kaiju scb in cf 10h program accordingly’ mean?)

Hermann blinks as he realizes his leg – his left leg, his better leg – feels sore, and not the kind of bone-deep ache he gets when his MS is acting up, but just the kind where he’d run for a few minutes and needed a short rest. He glances down and sees his leg bouncing and slaps his palm down onto it, willing himself to stop. He does. It’s nice to have control over his jitters and shakes, though he’s never been known to do it from excitement instead of illness.

A few minutes later, he catches himself tapping his fingers on the top of the desk. Ten minutes after that, he’s taking a stretch break, then decides he feels tired and lies down for a nap. Maybe half an hour later, he’s awake again and pacing the room, unsure why he has so much energy and can’t get it outside of him. Nothing is working. He can try to hold still, try to focus, but it keeps slipping away, leaving him to tap his knee or think about tangents or god knows what else. Frustrated, he pulls a blank sheet of paper from a drawer in Newton’s desk and starts working Breach equations. Perhaps straight math and physics will benefit him more than programming. He’s never been an expert programmer, anyways, preferring being able to see the way his equations worked in the real world with real moving objects as opposed to moving across a screen.

In the back of his mind, he can feel Newton’s incredulousness, insisting that Hermann’s one of the best programmers he’s met. Can Newton read his mind now? Did the drift do that to them, too, give them the ability to communicate? Hermann sighs and thinks back that he was trained well, even if he has no creativity for the task. Newton responds with something about the Jaegers being plenty damn creative.

It’s hard to say exactly how they’re speaking through the connection. It’s not straight words, but words are involved, and rarely in a straight line connecting to each other. Newton’s thoughts are littered with imagery and sounds, colors provided by the way he feels about a memory instead of reality, even occasionally coloring words that he uses. Hermann’s thoughts spiral, generally following a linear track and branching off into other thoughts, expressing more through emotion and touch than through vision. He seems to be getting caught up in his branches much more lately, and indeed, when he tries to visualize what he can remember of the morning, the branches seem much longer and thicker than normal. That could just be him, though. It’s his visualization, after all, and it’s just in his mind, there’s no way to prove that it’s actually how his mind works or that it’s really changed at all in anything other than his own perception.

He’s drifting off again. Hermann sighs and lies down. Maybe he’ll sleep longer this time and be able to get to work. He’s done maybe two thirds of what he can normally accomplish in a few hours, if that. He can feel some warmth from Newton’s end of the drift and sighs, hoping he’s sleeping better, at least.


	9. Chapter 9

When Newt wakes up, he can’t figure out why his right leg hurts so much worse than his left one. Sure, they were running around a lot last week, and he was expecting to be achy – 35 isn’t the same level of springy as 25, as much as he likes to pretend otherwise – but he doesn’t remember wrenching it or banging it up any worse than his left leg. Maybe it’s from when he landed on it while running from Otachi’s baby, and it just started acting up worse or feeling awful because his other leg is starting to feel better? Or maybe it’s… He tries to move it, feels it creak, reaches up to flick his fingers through his hair, feels his hand stop much shorter than usual when he does. Oh, right, yesterday happened. It really happened.

Newt sits up slowly and rubs his leg, trying to find the places where there seem to be the most kinks, working the muscle into submission. It’s not perfect, still painful, but it’ll have to do. When Newt stands, putting weight on it is painful. He grabs for the cane and hobbles to the bathroom. No wonder Hermann acts like such a cranky old man, his body feels like one. Even the aches from the little bits of running he’d done when he found Newt and rushed to LOCCENT the week before seem to still be hanging around, making it wearisome just to sit on the toilet.

His fingers glide over the skin of his legs. What exactly does Hermann have, anyways? He thinks back, finding that he has access to Hermann’s memories even without the drift now. He sorts through them – they seem somehow neater than his own, boxed up instead of piling on top of each other, even though they’re just thoughts – until he finds it – multiple sclerosis. Oh god. Newton feels sick to his stomach; he knew a professor who had started going into the later stages of the disease when he was a TA at MIT, and it hadn’t been pleasant. He doesn’t want to see Hermann going through that; he wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy, certainly not on the closest thing he could call a friend that he has.

Newt takes some time just to walk around the room, hoping it’ll help work out the soreness, but it doesn’t seem to do much. He hopes he won’t be stuck in Hermann’s body too long – physical therapy does not sound like a fun time, especially since he would be unfamiliar with the exercises. He doesn’t feel like hurting Hermann’s body worse than it already is.

For a while he just stares at his naked body in the mirror, amazed to see Hermann’s there instead of his own. He rarely, if ever, sees his colleague with less than two layers on, and he can feel why; his feet are freezing and his other limbs are cold as well, colder than normal even for the weather. Poor circulation on top of MS, isn’t that great?

And he has to admit scientific curiosity isn’t the only reason he’s looking. He’s had… feelings, a crush most likely, but something he avoids defining on Hermann for a while. At first he’d thought it was just the normal colleague-to-colleague friendliness, until he remembered that Hermann didn’t really do things like small talk and politeness and normal social interaction with him at all. Still, it makes his heart twinge to see Hermann enter a room, and his stomach has a tendency to flip or fill with butterflies on the rare occasion that Hermann touches him.

It’s ridiculous. It makes him feel like a teenager – well, not like a teenager again, but the way a teenager is supposed to feel, giddy and anxious and, well, to be honest, horny. He hadn’t had time for that shit as a teenager, school – and college - was tough enough as it was. If he got crushes, he just ran back to his room and jerked off until he felt better before returning to his work, and eventually they’d go away. Now, though, he actually has time to pursue someone, anyone really… and his sights are set on the person who probably hates him most now, thanks to this situation.

Newt can still appreciate his body, though. He runs his fingers through his hair, purposely messing it up, wondering what had spurred Hermann into such an awful cut. Did he do it himself? Was it to save money? Was he purposely trying to look unattractive? The cut could probably look good if a professional took clippers to it, but the way it is now, it just seems like a messy pile of broom straw on his head. He finds a comb and brushes it out until he can pretend to himself that it looks nice.

After that he takes a little time to… explore. For a moment he feels guilty about it, but come on, this is the experiment of a lifetime, probably of the century. He’s in someone else’s body! Why shouldn’t he catalogue the way it feels, the differences between himself and Hermann?

He runs his hand over his high cheeks, long nose, thin neck. Thin everything. Hermann needs to eat more. He figures he won’t have any problems helping Hermann in that department. He runs his hands down his chest, not exactly muscly, but stronger than Newt was  expecting. The physical therapy, he guesses. Hermann probably would want to take advantage of whatever opportunity he gets to improve his strength. Newt sighs and slides his hands over his stomach and sides, surprised at how sensitive they are, the brushing of skin sending a jolt up to his face and down to his cock. Oh god. Hermann’s gonna kill him. Would it be worth it?

Well, probably. It’d be fun, at least.

He starts to slide his hand lower when he feels a twinge of annoyance that is definitely not his own. He pulls his hand off and takes himself back to the bed, embarrassed, wondering if the annoyance is directed at him. Did Hermann sense him touching himself? He listens, eyes half-closed, to Hermann’s end of the connection, and finds he’s able to understand what Hermann’s thinking more clearly beyond just emotion. Hermann is frustrated, can’t concentrate. He hasn’t taken any pills yet. Newt sighs and wonders if he’s gonna have to force them down Hermann’s throat. Speaking of which, he needs to check Hermann’s meds. Maybe there’s something for his leg in there.

The number of bottles and times that pills need to be taken are much more complex than Newt’s normal routine, so much so that Hermann has to keep a calendar to keep track of the pills he doesn’t take daily. Thankfully, his notes are color-coded and easy to comprehend; Newt just needs to start marking off blue and red dots for the awkward pills. He gets himself a glass from the bathroom – larger than his own, with a bar and a chair in the shower and a bar to help him get on the toilet – and fills it with water, hoping Hermann doesn’t try to choke all this stuff down dry.

As he takes the pills, he hears Hermann thinking about programming and more frustration and math. Something about not being the best programmer. Newt rolls his eyes. Hermann’s one of the best he’s ever met, and he went to MI-fucking-T for god’s sake, one of the best schools for that shit. Hermann apparently hears him and shoots back that he doesn’t have the creativity for it.

Newt thinks simply, _Have you seen the damn Jaegers, dude? Your work. Your creativity._

Hermann makes some kind of objection and then his thoughts slip away to other subjects. Newt pulls himself back, hoping he can somehow block Hermann from what he’s about to do. He climbs into bed, making sure there’s a well-stocked tissue box next to the bed before he goes back under the covers. He gives himself a few moments to get warm and comfortable, running his hands up his sides again to feel the nice tingling that for some strange reason arouses him. Human sexual response is so strange, but so interesting, too. He vaguely feels Hermann fall asleep somewhere in his head and sighs in relief. Now he won’t feel like such a jackass doing this.

He runs his hand down from his neck, over his chest, down his stomach, taking a moment to appreciate the thin, sparse hair running down Hermann’s abdomen, to his cock. He curls his fingers around the shaft and groans as he pumps. Hermann’s cock is longer than his, but not as thick, so he tries not to feel jealous. C’mon, he’s not that asshole looking over people’s shoulders in the locker room.

Maybe it’s something about Hermann’s body, maybe it’s that he’s _in_ Hermann’s body, maybe it’s that he could get caught any moment if Hermann happens to feel it and wakes up, but it feels so good, better than normal. Newt slides his fingers over his nipples as he continues to pump himself, then through his hair. It all feels wonderful.

He barely manages to slip the tissues over himself when he comes, not expecting it so soon. Man, Hermann needs to get it on more often. Or possibly ever. Does Hermann have sex? Does Hermann want to have sex? Maybe he’s ace – but no, that’s bad to assume just because 60s professor clothes are not a turn-on for most people. (He assumes. They are a thing for him, but he suspects it’s more that Hermann wears them than it is the clothes themselves.) But it’s probably bad form to assume he’s into sex, or any certain person – he could totally check through Hermann’s memories for crushes but that feels… gross – shit, he feels disgusting  just for using Hermann’s body this way – ugh, now he’s pissed at himself. Maybe he should have thought this through more before he decided to use his crush’s body like this.

Maybe he should have thought. Maybe Hermann was right and the stuff that was wrong with his brain was more in his mind than in his body the way he’d always been taught, the way he’d always hoped. It was all so confusing.

But he didn’t feel his normal agitation, or the need to be doing five things at once. He’d been able to focus – not that it was usually much of a problem when he jerked off, but still. He’d even remembered his meds.

Even with Hermann’s disease, his ability to function already seems higher than Newt’s on most days.

Newt sighs. Thinking about going back to being unable to concentrate without medicine already seems awful and he hasn’t even done anything yet. He looks around the room. Hermann is such a tight-ass about his stuff – everything perfectly aligned, neat bookshelves, clothes tucked nicely away and folded to perfection in the drawers. Newt has half a mind to yank everything out, but then he’d have to straighten it out again before he and Hermann switch back.

He digs through Hermann’s closet, trying to find something that isn’t incredibly lame to wear. He might lo – like Hermann, but man, he cannot rock a sweater vest even in this body. He isn’t entirely sure how Hermann can rock it.

He zips up his pants when he hears someone punching in the unlock code into the door. “You coulda knocked first!” he shouts as he hastily tucks his shirt in.

“This is my room, and I will never get used to hearing –” Hermann stops short as he sees Newt. “What on earth are you doing?”

Newt raises his arms. He found a nice blue button-up hiding in the back of Hermann’s closet and put it on along with black slacks and some black dress shoes – still chunky, square, and about thirty years out of style, but still nicer than his oxfords. “I’m getting dressed,” Newt says, raising one eyebrow and grinning. 

“You are not wearing my dress shirt!” Hermann reaches forward and starts ripping at the buttons. “I purposely keep this one ready for special occasions –”

“What, like looking good?” Newt asks. “Or looking your age?”

“Like press conferences and attempts to raise funds, you dolt.” Hermann manages to get the shirt completely untucked and unbuttoned. “Change now. I don’t trust you not to ruin it.”

Those words again. Newt tries not to feel the pang of guilt and embarrassment and anger that’s been following him around since last night, changing the subject to avoid it. “I’m not gonna be working with kaiju samples today, dude, you can chill.”

“I don’t care what you’re doing, you still have to eat. I don’t want you wearing that shirt.”

“Does it really embarrass you that bad to see yourself looking like a human being instead of a caricature?” Newt looks down at his – Hermann’s – bare chest, remembers his… “experiment” earlier this morning, and flushes. “Or are you afraid of me rockin’ this hot bod?”

“Never speak those words again, in my voice or your own, but especially not mine.” Hermann goes to the closet, sniffing, feathers ruffled. Newt catches a cream-colored shirt with light green stripes with his face, followed by a dark brown sweater. “Put those on.”

“Could you at least _try_ to find things that match?” Newt asks, appalled, but Hermann is already out the door, moving much faster than Newt is used to. Wait – that’s Newt’s pace when he’s not with Hermann, of course it’s faster. He’s going to be the one limping and slowing them down now. Shit. He wonders at how Hermann already moves without his limp, amazing compared to yesterday when he moved with it as if it were more mental than physical.

He wishes it were more mental than physical. The ache never really goes away. Newt wonders if there’s some damage to it besides the MS, but he doesn’t want to go snooping in Hermann’s brain again so soon after the first time. He changes to the green shirt but keeps the rest of the outfit, even if it clashes, hoping it annoys Hermann to see him wearing his clothes with style.

Hermann ignores him when he enters the lab. Newt shrugs and heads off toward his desk, planning to take a look at his coding and see if he screwed something up in the programming when he tried to rearrange it to fit just him and Hermann. 

Hermann’s wearing a button-up under Newt’s old ugly Christmas sweater from tacky parties in years past. (Tendo always arranged a contest. Newt had won the first year and then been immediately disqualified so as not to ruin the next several years with even worse ones.) Newt makes a face at it, feels Hermann grumping about how it was the only one he could find in the back of his mind, and boots up the computer on his desk. He tries not to stare at the way that Hermann’s combed his hair down, letting it lie flat and some of the strands that refuse to go behind his ears fall in his eyes and over his forehead. He doesn’t really have that much of an ego, but come on, can’t Hermann at least try to make his hair look good? 

He doesn’t have to look around for his laptop for ten minutes to remember that he left it in his room yesterday before… before. “Hey, dude, you bring my laptop?”

Hermann glares at him, and okay, Newt finally gets where the angry puppy comments come from, geez, would he stop trying already? “You bring any of my stuff in here?”

Hermann hands him a flash drive. “I couldn’t find a scrap of paper in your room,” he says, annoyed.

“Because it’s 2025, dude, time to start being environmentally friendly. What about my laptop?”

“I went through it and took notes.”

“So much for privacy,” Newt says, and Hermann snorts. Newt gets nervous, but dismisses it; no way Hermann knows about this morning, he was asleep. He must be thinking of the drift. It would be helpful to get more than just snippets of emotions and memories from each other at a time… but it would also be horrible and Hermann would definitely know, so Newt will try to be grateful for now that the drift didn’t make them mindreaders on top of everything else. “I’ll go get it.”

“No, no,” Hermann says, putting his hands on Newt’s shoulders as Newt moves to stand. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Seriously, it’s fine, I remember where my room is –”

“I want you to start working on this problem now, and you can use that flash drive in your workstation.” What he doesn’t say, and what Newt catches on his face and in his head, is that he doesn’t want to worry about Newt doing something stupid to fuck his leg up or, worse, have an attack when Hermann doesn’t know where he is. Newt stiffens. It’s been a while since Hermann’s had an episode, it would be his luck to have one now. “Now start looking.”

Newt sighs, exaggerating it so Hermann knows just how annoyed he is without having to try to look through the drift, and turns back to the old desktop. His laptop might be old, but this thing might as well be one with the dinosaurs. As he waits for it to open Hermann’s files, he wonders again at the kaiju’s relationship with the planet’s previous tenants. What happened hadn’t been clear; he’d just gotten images of megalodons and brachyosauruses, velociraptors and ichtheomymuses, impressions of pain and fear and rage, nothing to tell him if the dinosaurs were some strange failed attempt at carbon-based kaiju or if the kaiju had caused the mass extinction event and then died off from suffocation in the wrong atmosphere.

He snaps out of his thoughts immediately when Hermann gets back, wincing again at the Christmas sweater. Just because he bought it didn’t mean he liked it for anything other than ironic holiday parties. “Thanks, bud.”

“You’re very welcome,” Hermann snaps before returning to the blackboard. His writing is much less shaky than it was; it makes Newt wonder what his handwriting might look like if he tried to write now. His penmanship had never been great, and it wasn’t helped by the slow conversion the developed world had gone through to being mostly paperless. Newt shakes his head, pulls himself from the thought and gets to work. It’s amazing how easily he can stop himself from going off on tangents when he needs to. He’d known his dis- dis- it’s a hard word to think about even twenty years after being diagnosed with them - disabilities were literally all in his head, but it’s never been so profoundly obvious before.

Newt starts to roll his sleeves up just to annoy Hermann, but discovers that his arms are cold and pulls them back down. By the time the laptop’s booted up, he’s considering finding that sweater Hermann pulled out earlier, ugly or not. He looks up to see Hermann rolling the shirt and sweater’s arms up, staring at the tattoos on his arms. He doesn’t look annoyed or disgusted by them; rather, he looks fascinated, turning his arm a fraction or so on occasion to look at another part of them. Newt smiles. His mouth feels too wide. “You take my meds this morning?” he calls.

“What?” Hermann drops his arm to his side immediately.

“My meds. You can’t focus?”

The next response comes with a condescending look that still looks a bit silly on Newton’s body’s face. Hermann may have mastered every nasty face possible with his own features, but he hasn’t figured out Newt’s yet. Newt tries not to grin back. “I’m fine. I don’t need help concentrating.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Newt says as he turns back to the computers in front of him. He hears Hermann grumble something under his breath while he reads through Hermann’s notes. Guy was thorough. Newt already knows that but this is practically a report in and of itself – Hermann even cited which files he took things from. For the most part. He occasionally typoed or left an open parentheses or forgot to write down the titles for a few. There are notes next to some of the names that he clearly tapped out when frustrated. (“Who would name a file apoiwjefopojf?” one reads. Newt wants to say, “Me, duh,” but Hermann probably wouldn’t even remember writing that.)

“Did you go through _all_ of my shit when you did this?” Newt asks, finally, after writing annoyed little messages next to most of Hermann’s coding suggestions. Hermann doesn’t answer. “Hermann!” Newt looks up. Hermann writes in uneven scrawls all over the chalkboard in a frenzy, focused so hard that he can’t hear anything going on around him. Newt sighs and stands; enough is enough. He reaches for the bottle of emergency stuff he keeps around in case of days like this and makes his way to Hermann.

Hermann just about jumps out of his skin when Newt pokes him on the shoulder. “What?” he asks, pissed off. Newt suspects he’s had more problems with concentrating than he’s willing to admit.

Newt pops the cap off the bottle and hands Hermann a few pills. “Take these.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. And if you try to keep focusing that hard, you’re gonna burn out and not be able to do another thing all day.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It doesn’t for you.” Newt taps the side of his head. It still feels strange to be touching his own body from the outside. And also to reach down to get at someone. “It does for me. That’s how ADHD works. Either you can’t focus on anything, or you use up so much brainspace focusing that you need a long-ass break after.”

“I am not, not afflicted by your-”

“Okay, I get that your European ass probably thinks ADD is stupid and your dad probably told you it was a lazy kid’s excuse, but I have it and now you have it and you’re going to deal with it before all your grumbling and ignoring me makes me punch you through the wall.” Newt holds out the pills. “I know you can dry swallow this shit, I do it all the time, just take it.”

Hermann brushes his chalky hand off on Newt’s pants and takes the pills, swallowing and making a face at the taste. “Gotta love Ritalin, right?” Newt says sarcastically. Hermann just rolls his eyes and turns back to the chalkboard.


	10. Chapter 10

The two manage to work in relative silence for a few hours, only interrupted by Newton asking questions about Hermann’s notes and an occasional annoyed sigh at the coding. Coding has never been Newton’s strong suit, Hermann knows that, but Newt wrote the original coding to hook into a kaiju brain and all Hermann did was go into it to activate the parameters that would allow for two people to drift with it. Newton had already coded it for two people; he’d just dummied out the part for person number two. Had he been expecting Hermann to come into the lab and join him? Maybe if Hermann had gotten up earlier that day, they could have saved a lot of trouble…

Hermann shakes his head and tries to get back to the board. The pills have already started to help, not that he’d admit as much to Newton. He tries to be understanding of his colleague’s eccentricities, but it’s clear the man’s intelligent; it’s hard to shake the old lessons from his childhood that most of Newton’s… handicaps are more psychosomatic and lazy than something his mind does all by itself. Then again, he remembers all the times before he’d been forced to use the cane more permanently when people would get annoyed with his slower movements and shaky hands. How many times had people called him clumsy and left it at that in the year before his diagnosis?

“Seriously dude, how much of my stuff did you go through?” Newton asks.

Hermann blinks. “I just wanted to figure out –”

“You went through my stuff! All of my stuff, if you managed to find this many things! Am I gonna come back and find out you completely sorted all my things into some Gottlieb system? I’ve got my own gestalt going on, I don’t need -”

“I only touched what I needed, Newton,” Hermann says, scowling. He really wishes Newton would stop giving him that strange look whenever he glares at him. “Unlike you.” He also wishes Newton wouldn’t forget that they can see each other while they sleep. Hermann saw Newton the same way that Newton saw Hermann that first night after the breach closed. 

He doesn’t need to turn around to see that Newton has gone pale. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I just –”

“I went through your files, you used my body.” Hermann sighs. “We were bound to hurt each other somewhere, weren’t we?”

“Well, uh, yeah, but –”

“You didn’t think. I wish that I was used to that by now.” Hermann knows the words are harsh, but they’re also true. Newton doesn’t think. He never has. That was how last night happened, how yesterday happened, how the first drift with the kaiju brain happened. Well, the brain drift may have turned out well in the end, and involved a lot of technical and practical thinking on his part, but he never had spare space in his brain for common sense or self-preservation. The man had no idea how to really take care of himself when there was something more interesting going on.

“Look, man, I didn’t mean to – I wasn’t trying to –” Newton takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. And if you want to… y’know… with my, uh, body, that’s – that’s okay.”

Newton apologized about something. That’s a first if Hermann ever heard it. “I…” He doesn’t even know how to respond. “I – thank you. I will not – won’t do that, thank you very much.”

“Okay.” Newton turns back to the computer and worked, somehow remaining quiet outside of the sound of his fingers clacking on the keyboard or occasional groans of annoyance at the language on the computer.

It takes him until 1PM, about an hour after they usually eat, to remember that Newt normally gets their lunches for them. The mess is still open for second shift lunch, so Hermann heads out without a word to get them food. He’s surprised Newton hasn’t said anything about it, about anything, really. Normally he can’t shut up, even when the two of them are in bad moods or had a worse argument than usual. Maybe it has something to with what this particular… conversation was about? Maybe it’s just that Newt is out of his own brain. Hermann has always been the quieter of the two of them, maybe it’s having an effect on Newton.

Carrying things in both hands is a sensation he hasn’t enjoyed in a long time. He quietly smiles about not walking with a cane as he makes his way down the halls, able to lift two trays without a problem. When he gets back to the lab, he sets one down in front of Newton and the other next to it, pulling up his desk chair to eat. “Thanks,” Newton says, voice small. “My leg – your leg hurts.”

“It does that,” Hermann says, wondering if he should apologize. This situation isn’t his fault and it isn’t his fault either that he contracted a chronic illness, but still, it seems like it might be polite… This is so confusing. “Try getting up and stretching it out every once in a while.”

“I will once I figure the cane out,” Newton says, cutting his chicken with a little more violence than the poor patty probably deserves.

“Have you gotten much done?” Hopefully Newton will stop complaining about his body soon.

“I think I have what I need to do figured out, I just need to think of how to translate it into Python instead of something that makes actual sense.”

“I still can’t believe you created your own drift program using Python.”

“I can’t believe you programmed the jaegers with C++!” Newt sighs. “I guess it’s better than HTML or JavaScript but man…”

“Javascript? I’m not sure you could even use that for a robot, let alone something of that magnitude.”

“You totally could if you were creative about it.”

“I don’t think that most robots are capable of running Javascript, Newton.”

“But if you built one that did…”

Even in each other’s bodies, they still argue like normal. This one, at least, is a friendly one, one they’ve had before. They slip into it like an old, broken-in pair of shoes. Sure, it’s like running a three-legged race together in those shoes, now that they get glimpses inside each other’s minds and occasionally finish each other’s sentences, but it’s still the same debate they’ve come to again and again.

When Hermann finishes eating, he asks, “Do you have anything written down about what you want to change?”

“Huh?” 

“I don’t have anything that urgently needs to be done. Perhaps I could review your work.”

“Yeah, sure.” Newton copies some files onto a flash drive and hands it to Hermann. “That should have the original code, plus the changes I’m making.”

“I’ll take a look at them.”

“Thanks, man.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“No seriously, thanks.” Newton grabs his wrist and stares up at him, into his eyes. “You know I’m shit at this, and you’re amazing when it comes to computer stuff. You’re more likely to fix this up than I am.”

Hermann huffs. “If I can understand your notes, perhaps.”

Hermann feels a flash of annoyance and hurt through the drift. “Yeah, yeah.” He drops Hermann’s wrist and waves him off towards his own bank of computers when he tries to ask what’s wrong. What did he say? Did he miss something here?

Newton doesn’t normally touch him that way. He flicks back through his memories and lands on one from this morning. Oh. … _Oh._ He flushes red and disappears behind his computer. Finding out your lab partner has a crush on you through the drift, and through _that_ of all things… no wonder he’d felt the need to… _anyways._

It’s not that he doesn’t feel something of the same back. He just has no idea how to say or do anything about it. He never has. The one relationship he’s been in before was started by the other man. And ended. Part of his breaking it off might have had to do with Hermann’s anxiety and lack of initiative in his love life. Knowing himself, he’s going to mess up here, too, for the same reasons – he’s had to put his life on hold for the war, and romance has not exactly been on his mind…

“Were you just thinking what I think you were thinking?” Newton shouts across the lab. Hermann sighs, shakes his head, takes another of Newton’s pills, and gets back to work.


	11. Chapter 11

Hours pass. The occasional chat turns into bickering and then true arguing over coding, over the language being used, over various factors Newt wants to change, over anything at all, really. Finally, Newt can’t take the tension anymore. “I know you have a crush on me!” Hermann flushes bright red and puts his head back down into his work. “Don’t do that, man! I can see it in your head! Both of our heads!”

“I don’t see what relevance this topic has to our current situation.”

“It has – it has everything to do with – c’mon, would you loosen up for one minute? I always thought it was your leg that made you so stiff and stuffy, but I guess not.”

Hermann sits up straighter, looking at Newt. “Why would my leg affect my personality so?”

“Y’know, you’re already British enough, gotta keep a stiff upper lip and all that.” Newt’s started gesticulating the way he normally does, arms flailing, and nearly knocks his hand into his laptop. He’s not used to the length of these arms. “And I doubt it helped your sex life.”

“I would appreciate it if you would not make references to –”

“Why not? It’s not like we don’t know each other.” Newt gets to his feet. “Besides, I want to sex you up, I think it’s relevant.”

“Please never say that again.” Tendo grimaces as he walks in. “I’m glad you guys are finally getting your sexual tension worked out, but do it off the clock, at least.”

“What?” Hermann says, startled.

“Shut up,” Newt says at the same time, glaring.

Tendo stares at Newt until he remembers. “Right, right, those are words I never thought I woulda heard coming from your mouth.” He sighs. “You guys getting anywhere?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, grateful to change the subject. “Would you like to take a look?” This results in an hour-long debate between Newt and Hermann about punctuation placement. Tendo backs out fifteen minutes in, saying something about his kid and running away. Coward, Newt thinks.

It ends with Newt and Hermann standing on either side of Newt’s desk, shouting, Newt waving his hands in Hermann’s face while Hermann stands stock still, arms folded. They barely even remember what it’s about anymore, Newt just knows that he’s right and Hermann’s wrong. And something in him tingles when he looks at Hermann, which is super fucking weird because he’s looking at himself, how narcissistic is he, but while the face may be his, the gestures, the tone, the body language is all Hermann, and there’s something about seeing his mannerisms in Newt’s body that sets off fireworks in him. He ignores what Hermann says, reaches forward, and grabs his sweater, pulling him forward into a kiss.

It is very, very strange to kiss his own lips. He wonders if this is the way his first girl and boy and nonbinaryfriends felt about his kissing, because Hermann’s barely moving and it’s awkward as hell. Newt finally gives up and leans back, miffed. “Please don’t use my body that way,” Hermann says stiffly.

“Really, dude? Really?”

“Yes, really.” Hermann places his hands on Newt’s wrists but doesn’t let go of them. “Using each other’s bodies in this way… it’s not…” He can’t come up with the words to voice how it feels. Strange. He’s rarely this inarticulate.

“Okay, this morning was bad, I get your point,” Newt says. “But now? If we’re mutually into it?”

“I still think it’s inappropriate.”

“Come on, no one’s around!”

“That’s not what I mean.” Hermann breathes out a deep sigh. “What if you wrench my leg? What if I bruise your body in some way? What if you bite me and grow to regret it later, when the hickey is healing?”

Newt’s eyes widen. “Kinky.”

“Not really.” Hermann leans forward and presses his lips gently to Newt’s. What does Hermann think of kissing himself? This is a bizarre experience all around. “Don’t mistake my intentions, I would like to… work this out with you. But I don’t even know my own body right now. Wait.” With that he walks back to his desk. Newt tries not to laugh when he sees Hermann’s boner tenting his jeans. He hears a retort in his mind, something about not taking his meaning literally.

They stay up half the night reviewing the code and running it in a simulator. Hermann’s perfectly awake, wants to keep tweaking things, wants to make it absolutely perfect. Newt doesn’t understand how he’s still going; his legs are aching and his arms feel sore and his head is heavy. “Shouldn’t you be tired?” Newt asks.

“Hm?”

“You’re still going a million miles an hour.”

“I am?” Hermann stares off into space for a moment. He’s been doing that more often over the last few hours. Newt can tell the Ritalin, at least its good effects, are all gone at this point. Hermann snaps back. “I suppose I’m not tired yet. And you are…?”

“Exhausted.” Newt lays his arms on the desk and sets his chin down on top of them. “Would like to be sleep, please.”

“Would you speak English?”

“Nein.”

“Oh, stop being contrary.”

Newt giggles. “That sounds really weird when I say it. When you say it. When – you know what I mean.” He giggles again. “This sounds funny too.”

Hermann tries to look annoyed, but there’s a smile starting on his lips. “You need to go to bed, Newton.”

“Not gonna argue with you there.” Newt yawns as he stands. His knees sound like rusty hinges. How has he never heard Hermann moving before? The body is a strange, strange thing. “Don’t stay up too much longer. I don’t wanna be worn out when we change back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I’d say we did a pretty damn good job on the code today, don’t you?” Newt asks.

“I did a damn fine job,” Hermann corrects him.

“Yeah, yeah, master coder, I bow down to thee, whatever,” Newt says, yawning so hard it stretches his jaw and his last syllable. “Get some sleep.”


	12. Chapter 12

By three in the morning, Hermann is regretting his decision to stay up and keep working on the code. He gives it one last glance-over before he admits to himself that the data just isn’t registering before he slips off to Newton’s room, curling up in the sheets, too tired to bother taking his clothes off.

He regrets that when he wakes up a few hours later, overheating, the horrendous sweater constricting him instead of comforting him. He rips it off and throws it down, sitting there and feeling his own sweat cool him before he decides it’s disgusting and heads for the bathroom.

The shower is lovely, with truly hot water for once (since it’s before anyone in their right minds would be awake) and the ability to move how he pleases. The thought of needing to use a shower chair again makes his blood run cold. This is so nice, just being able to relax into the water… He doesn’t take too much longer, still too many people in the Shatterdome and too little hot water to go around for him to stay in, but it’s nice while it lasts.

He spends a while staring at himself in the mirror as he dries off, trying to figure out exactly what it is he likes about Newton’s body other than the obvious mobility issues. The tattoos are garish, and Hermann isn’t shocked to discover how far down they go – he’s seen Newton unbutton his shirt before, it’s been more than hinted that Newton wants a bodysuit – but they don’t seem ugly or loud in the same way they did when they first met in person. They fit him, they are him. Hermann scratches at one on his shoulder. Maybe being able to move freely is more than he ever could have wished for again, but this is not his body. Newt took his and owned it, is still owning it even when not actually in possession of it.

His hands wander downwards, over the bit of paunch Newton always worries over and down to the bottom of the tattoos at his hips. A few fingers dig into his body hair – a strange feeling, Hermann’s used to having much less – and find their way down farther. What was it like for Newt to… to… Hermann is in his thirties, he should not be so embarrassed to think about sex. But there’s something about being in the body of a man he’s fantasized about, and knowing that Newt’s already acted on his own fantasizing, that makes this so incredibly strange.

He rubs himself a few times and already feels himself starting to get hard. Newton is so sensitive in so many ways. He hesitates as he watches himself in the mirror, not exactly sure what he expected. He’s never been terribly interested in sex or masturbation; it just seemed like a nice bonus on top of a good relationship with someone. This doesn’t feel special or naughty or especially good; it just feels kind of dirty, even with Newton’s – reluctant – approval. The idea of doing it as payback just doesn’t seem right at all.

Hermann sighs and leaves the bathroom, looking for pajamas. He can already hear Newton in the back of his mind, not drift-Newton but memories-Newton, talking about refractory periods and the mechanics behind insemination and how amazing the human body is. He doesn’t even remember why the topic’s come up before, or if it’s something Newton’s discussed with him – well, at him. Various old conversations leaking through the drift have left him unsure of what Newton discussed with other colleagues and professors and his father, and things he’s talked about with Hermann.

His focus is drifting away again. Hermann lies down in Newton’s bed and closes his eyes. He feels like he’s gotten barely anything done today, even though he knows he and Newton worked hard to get the code working and that he worked even later than he normally does. Does Newton always feel this restless? Is it Newton’s body or is it him? Today was a waste in terms of his own work, after all. He wouldn’t have lost today if the body switch hadn’t happened.

But it’s not like he has much to do now anyways… he sighs and turns onto his other side, hoping he’ll get back to sleep soon and without the disgusting sweat from before.


	13. Chapter 13

Newt practically leaps out of bed the next day – or he would, if his body would let him. ADD problems be damned, he’s ready to go back to himself. It hurts to be Hermann. He doesn’t mean that the way he used to, talking about how stuffed up and proper and _boring_ Dr. Hermann Gottlieb could be – he means it literally now. Being Hermann sucks. Newt can’t imagine what it must be like for him on bad days, if Newt’s experiencing the good ones. He’s a thirty-something guy in a seventy-something man’s body. No wonder he’s always dressed like an old man.

He’s surprised that Hermann isn’t there when he gets to the lab. Oh well. He checks over what Hermann did last night – he left the computer running, strange. It’s clear that Hermann’s work got sloppier overnight until it completely fades out of what they’d done before Newt went to bed. He wishes Hermann would listen to him – he does actually know the way his body works, after all.

It takes another hour for Hermann to come to the lab. He looks bushed. Newt sighs. “Did you learn your lesson?”

“Sleep is a precious commodity and I should get more of it,” Hermann says, sarcasm coating his words so heavily that Newt’s tempted to roll his eyes the same way Hermann would if he’d said that. He’s talking faster than normal. Weird.

“Let’s get back to this, okay?” Newt says, taking pity and not being sarcastic back. The kind of tired Hermann seems to be suffering from is brutal.

Instead of working separately, Hermann leans over Newt’s shoulder, telling him what corrections to make, arguing when Newt inevitably starts typing without asking for Hermann’s input. Hermann keeps talking faster and faster, breaking off in mid-thought to start a new one, tapping his fingers and pacing around Newt until Newt finally says, “Would you freaking stay in one place, man?”

“Hm?” Hermann slows down. “I would, but I just, I need to keep moving, I can’t stop –” He shudders. “I should be tired, I am tired, but it feels like if I don’t move I’m going to jump out of my skin.”

“Oh.” Newt goes pale. “Oh shit. Did you take your meds?”

Hermann’s eyes widen. “I – I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s, it’ll be okay man, just –” Newt blows air out through his teeth, trying to figure out what to do. “Tell you what, you go get your meds, we’ll do something to calm you down.”

Hermann walks – more like runs – out the door. He’s back in record time, barely reading the bottles before he swallows his pills. He chokes and gags on one before coughing it back up, then makes a face as he tastes it and swallows again. Newt, trying not to laugh, gets him a glass of water. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Hermann says, annoyed. “Look, I’ll be fine, alright? This is temporary –”

“My hyperactive episodes can last anywhere from half an hour to a full day, Hermann.” Newt tries to smile at him. “It’ll go away, but I can’t say for sure how long, especially since I don’t usually take my meds on bad days. Maybe if we’re lucky, it’ll be gone by lunchtime.”

“I hope so,” Hermann says. “Let me type.” Newt does until Hermann’s foot starts tapping and his typing speeds up even faster than normal and he’s started typoing and forgetting to actually ask Newt for input.

Newt pulls Hermann out of the chair. “Okay, computer priveleges revoked. Go run around the room or something.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m serious, it may help get the energy out. Or not.”

“Does it ever help you?”

“No.”

So Hermann goes back to pacing, crossing the floor and rapid-fire dictating instructions to Newt, getting more and more pissed as Newt makes him repeat himself or shut up for a second to finish typing.

Despite the exhaustion, the hyperactivity, and the never-ending debates, they manage to get something resembling finished by dinnertime. Instead of eating, they go to Tendo in LOCCENT. He gives them both wary looks. “You realize that this is gonna be rough, right? And that I need to eat?”

“Uh, yeah,” Newt says, impatient. “We’re not gonna be able to do this until tomorrow, anyways, the way Hermann is right now would make it impossible.”

“The way he is…?” Tendo observes Hermann tapping the fingers of both of his hands on a desk and muttering to himself because he needs to talk and keep talking but no one is listening to him anyways. “Okay, yeah, not cool. Will he actually be better tomorrow?”

“Should be. You’ve seen me hyper, it doesn’t usually last more than a day.”

“I hope so for his sake,” Hermann says uneasily. “So let me eat, and go to bed, you two look trashed.”

Hermann huffs. “Why does everyone keep telling me that today?”

“Because you do,” Newt says.

“It’s not like you look much better,” Hermann says.

“It’s not my fault your body sucks!” Newt replies. Oh. Oh shit. That should not have come out of his mouth. Hermann is turning an interesting shade of red - Newt knows he blushes easily but he didn’t realize he could get so...  purplish.

“I’m gonna step out,” Tendo says before slipping out of LOCCENT. The only other people left to hear Hermann’s rage are a skeleton crew who all already have their heads down, waiting. 

But surprisingly, Hermann doesn’t scream. He lets out a breath, long and slow, and says, “Thank you for informing me of that. I was not aware.” Before Newt can blink, he’s gone.

“Hey, wait!” Newt calls after him, trying to chase but unable to go very fast - how the hell can Hermann run with this damn cane? “God, I didn’t mean - I shouldn’t have - I’m an asshole!”

“Damn straight!” Hermann says back. He slows down a bit, letting Newt catch up to him, but still walking in front of him, showing Newt his back.

“Look, it would suck to be in anyone else’s body, okay? Not just yours. I’m sure you aren’t having a fun time in mine –”

“Yes, I’m sure you would have said that to someone without a chronic physical illness.” Newt winces.

“Yeah, dude, I probably would have. I know my body better than yours or anyone else’s. And like I said, I’m an asshole.”

“That isn’t an excuse, Newton.” Hermann’s voice is hard-edged. He’s had enough. Newt is probably in some deep shit now, if he somehow hasn’t been since this whole disaster started.

“I – look, I’m – I’m sorry, okay? I fucked up and I said something shitty and I can’t shut my goddamn mouth even when I’m not in the body with perpetual foot-in-mouth disease.” Newt is starting to pant. Hermann slows down a little more. Newt isn’t sure if he’s doing it because of the apology or because he doesn’t want Newt to twist his ankle.

“So my body sucks?”

“You know better than I do.”

Hermann sighs. “Yes. I have multiple sclerosis, and you’re experiencing the better days of it, from what I can tell.”

“Yeah, so I know just how much it sucks now.” Hermann gives him an annoyed look. “Well, I know better than I did a few days ago!” Newt grumbles.

“I suppose.” Hermann heads off in a completely different direction from the lab when they reach a fork in the hallways. “And I suppose I understand your… mental issues better now as well. Now why don’t we get something to eat and write down what I need to take when tomorrow?”


	14. Chapter 14

Newt tries his best not to fiddle with the straps of his harness. He hasn’t been as fidgety the last few days, but being in the sim room again makes him nervous. He glances over at Hermann, who is also fidgeting. Not much of a surprise there, it’s probably more the ADHD than any nerves on his part. He probably doesn’t realize he’s doing it, since he usually tries to go all calm and stoic when shit goes down. Well, except for his general shakiness. Newt can feel a slight tremor in the hand that’s not currently running up and down the harness.

“You guys ready to go?” They nod at the same time. Tendo looks a little bit put off. “Okay, you know the drill. No RABIT-chasing, stay with each other. And hopefully staying with each other won’t be a problem this time.” He takes a deep breath, double checks that the correct programs are loaded, and starts his protocols. “Okay, ten, nine, eight…” Newt reaches over and takes Hermann’s hand in his. Hermann gives him a questioning look, but before he can say anything, they’re both thrown back into the drift.

_“Five, four, three, two!” Hermann shouts, five years old again, playing with a toy space shuttle_

_Newt tries to strum a guitar in time with a metronome and kicks the thing when he can’t_

_but the quadratic equation isn’t the right thing to use here don’t insult me I know how old I_

_why do I sometimes see colors when I hear music am I synesthetic on top of a freak or_

_dammit why won’t my leg move why won’t anything mo_

_too much too much oh god why can’t I shut up_

_he wrote me another letter why would he_

_roaring and screaming in the looms as another is knit toge_

“Shit!” That’s definitely Newton. “No kaiju no kaiju no kaiju!”

“Don’t chase it!” Is that Tendo? Is that Hermann? Someone’s saying it but they don’t know where it’s coming fr

_no I can’t be a pilot of course I can’t why would_

_fuck why is music theory so hard it’s practically freaking mat_

_why do people think classical music is boring it’s basically ma_

_clawed feet shredding through coral reefs, then jungles, then cit_

_Oh god they’re here!_ Newt’s thoughts, Hermann’s voice as he watches the mass of the hivemind envelop them. This time they stay apart from it, though Newt is beginning to feel the overwhelm settling on his mind again, trying to push in like last time.

_I know, Newton!_

_Dude this is not cool not cool not cool!_ Newt sounds more like himself now, though himself right now means frightened.

Hermann’s voice guides Newt back towards their headspace, away from the kaiju and their memories. _Calm down. We put in protocols to protect against this._

 _Right._ Newt takes Hermann’s hand – definitely mental, he can’t tell in the physical world at all – and pulls Hermann along the rest of the way out of the blue strands surrounding them.

 _Why are they still here?_ Newt is outside the hivemind now, looking at it. It’s still the mass of blue tangled cords from before, but the threads connecting Newt and Hermann to it are weak, dying. The pressure is pulling away, unable to break through to Newt’s head again. Newt stomps on Hermann’s cord, breaking it. Hermann watches and does the same to Newt’s with his better leg. _That should get rid of them._ They both feel a jolt, flung backwards in reality. Tendo shouts something but they can’t understand what.

“Do you think that’s the end of it?” Newt asks. His voice is definitely his now, in the physical world and even in the headspace. He can see physically again, his glasses have fallen off and the world is blurry.

“Perhaps. I hope so.” Hermann’s leaning to the side, the way he normally does with his cane, even though he’s not holding anything. He sighs. “I’ll miss – I liked moving – never mind.”

“I’ll miss being able to think straight.” Newt reaches for Hermann mentally and hugs him. “I’d rather have the suck I know than the suck I don’t, though.”

“I suppose.” Hermann pulls away, reluctantly, mentally and physically. Newt opens his physical eyes fully, tries to see where his glasses are before his vision starts to spin. “I think we’re going to…”

“Ulgh,” is all Newt can manage before he passes out.


	15. Chapter 15

Hermann can’t say he’s not disappointed when he wakes up. His leg is particularly stiff today, and the medical bay beds are not very comfortable. He groans and pulls himself to a sitting position, wondering why he still feels so damn tired. Shouldn’t that be all on Newton now?

He looks down, checks himself over. The same black pants and brown shirt that Newton wore into the lab. Well, Newton in Hermann’s body. He pulls up his pant leg just to be sure, and yes, there are his own skinny legs and the small scar over his right knee that most people can’t even see. He looks over to the bed beside him. Newton lies there in his ugly Christmas sweater.  Hermann smiles; at least he’ll never have to wear that again.

He gets to his feet. “Hermann?” someone says. Hermann looks up; Tendo sits by Newt’s bed, some paperwork on a clipboard in his hands and a pen in his mouth. “I hope it’s Hermann?”

Hermann smiles. “Yes.” He makes his way to Newton’s bed, wondering where his cane is. Hopefully someone remembered to bring it down here after they passed out. He reaches down, brushes Newton’s face. It’s so nice to see it looking up at him instead of looking out at him from a mirror. “Newton?”

Newt’s eyes, half-open, shut and then open again, staring up at Hermann. “Did it work?” he asks, voice slow and groggy, like he just woke up from a nap.

“I believe it did,” Hermann says. Newt smiles, sitting up.

“Great. So that means I can do this now.” Hermann lets out a short gasp as Newton pulls him down for a kiss. Behind them, Tendo mutters something about privacy and PDAs. Hermann doesn’t particularly care as he wraps his arms – his own arms, thank you – around Newton’s – Newt’s – shoulders.

When they break away for air, Newt says, “Look, I’m sorry, that was shitty and the worst and I didn’t mean –”

“It’s alright,” Hermann says. “We’ve fixed it.”

“I hope so.” Newt tries to bend his leg. “Get off me, you’re heavy.”

“Yes, we’ve definitely fixed it,” Hermann says, rolling his eyes, as he gets up. Newt smirks as he bends and flexes his limbs, making sure everything’s working properly. “Now that that’s out of the way…”

“Wanna make two be one again tonight?” Newt says with a mischievous grin.

Hermann considers slapping Newt. “That is one of the worst jokes I have ever heard you make, and that’s saying something. Please never say it again.”

“Why don’t you make me shut up?” Newt teases. They ignore Tendo’s groans in the background as Hermann leans in.


End file.
